Catholic ice cream store owner persecuted following support for marriage amendment

February 27, 2009

After a personal call from Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento, members of the Leatherby family donated $20,000 in support of Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that upheld marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Since then, Leatherby’s Family Creamery has faced a boycott, picketing, harassing phone calls and e-mails, obscene Valentine’s Day cards, and threats of physical violence to its employees. ““We got a call from police department and the sheriff’s department saying, ‘We are concerned for your safety,’” says Allan Leatherby. “Is Mother Teresa a hateful person? She has the same beliefs I do.” Leatherby, who has done volunteer work for an AIDS hospice, recounted a conversation with one critic. “After talking with him, I said I used to work at a certain house for gay men dying of AIDS. He broke down in tears and said, ‘One of my partners died there.’” Recounting that he grew up in a Catholic orphanage, “The man said, ‘The Catholic Church had done more for me than anyone else in my life.’ He said he had been abused before he entered the orphanage, and said he wouldn’t have been gay if he had had a strong man in his life.”

 

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Further information:

• Targeted Proposition 8 supporter urges Catholics to ‘stand up’ despite critics (CNA)
• Leatherby’s Family Creamery
• Leatherby’s Catering